4 hours Ago By Claire Hyland
Gay Byrne’s daughters are preparing for their first Christmas without both their beloved father and mother this year. Daughter Crona said: ‘It’s going to be a hard one. I don’t know.
Day-to-day will be different. We’ll obviously go out to visit the grave. ‘It’s going to be very different this year having lost Mum a few weeks ago.
We’re just going to have a very quiet one, myself, my husband and our two kids. We’re joining friends who very kindly invited us to the Shelbourne Hotel for Christmas Eve, so we’re going there and then it will be quietly back to our house in Naas and Christmas for us and there’s a few activities planned.’ Her mother, Kathleen Watkins, died in November aged 90.
Reflecting on happier times, Crona told Evoke.ie : ‘When Dad’s radio show was on Grafton Street, we used to split up, and Suzy [her sister] would go with Mum and I would go with Dad to go shopping for an extra treat, and I had been begging for a pair of leather trousers and suddenly Dad bought them for me. It was one of the best gifts I ever received.
’ She also recalled a year ‘where I showed Dad a pair of earrings I loved in Appleby jewellers and Dad said “Forget it! You’ve already got your present”. Mr Appleby Senior said “Try them on” so I tried them on and he said, “You have to buy them now because you’re not allowed try on earrings because we can’t resell them”’. Her sister Suzy remembered their mother at her funeral as someone who ‘believed without question that she and Gay would be reunited in Heaven’.
She said: ‘Our father, Gay, quite simply adored Mam.’.
